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Maksim twists around and splashes a sheet of water over both of us. “Focus on the rafting,” he snaps, and I laugh even harder.

On the ride back, in the fading light, Maksim takes a car Yuri has called for him, and before he goes he pulls me into a brief, restrained hug, the kind that holds nothing back except everything, and a pang catches under my ribs.

“Are you okay?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. “But I will be.” A sadness settles over me as he steps back before I can offer any comfort, refusing it so he will not have to feel pathetic in front of me. There is a version of Maksim who stuck his foot out at Sablo House months ago, cruel and careless and cutting me open for sport, and this is not that man. Whatever else this year did to all of us, it seems to have finally grown him up.

Maksim leaves, and Milo waves at his car until it disappears around the bend, and then sleep overtakes my brother against my side before we are halfway home.

I watch the streetlights slide across Lev’s face in the dark, the city a neon river of ambition and rot beyond the window, and the taste of the kiss still lingers on my mouth, leaving me giddy all over again. His words in the cable car sit warm behind my ribs, and I turn them over one at a time the whole ride.

I love who you are, he said, not for the baby, not for the protection, just me. Nobody has ever wanted the plain fact of me before, without a use attached to it, and I don’t entirely know what to do with how much that undoes me.

At the house Lev bought last month, the one with a yard he has shown Milo twice and never once pressured us to move into, Yuri lifts the sleeping Milo and carries him up to the guest room. For the first time, Milo sleeps under this roof, and there is not a single guard posted at his door.

Lev catches my wrist and draws me out through the back doors into the backyard. Warm, gleaming lights line a stone path I have never walked before, glowing low against the dark, curving away between the hedges toward something he clearly arranged long before we ever left this morning.

At the end of the path sits a small wooden table, and on it rests a wedding planning binder.

I open it, and the first page is filled with Lev’s own severe, upright handwriting, the same hand that once wrote don’t say yes to him on a florist’s card.

The groom’s line reads his name. The bride’s line reads, in his hand, whatever she decides. Not her name. Not a signature line waiting to be filled. Just her choice, left open, on a document from a man who has never in his life left anything to chance. My nose stings hard, and a wave barely kept at bay rises behind my eyes.

I tap my nails on the tabletop. “You prepare formal documents for a proposal,” I say, and my voice comes out brittle, not steady.

“Yuri suggested it,” he says. “That is what I keep him on my payroll for.”

“Thank God, he was actually right this time,” I say.

Every column of the wedding plan is left blank, page after page of empty fields, until the very last one. On the final page, in that same careful hand, it says the wedding will be entirely hers to design, and the marriage will be decided by the two of them together.

My tears spill over, and Lev waits, his hands at his sides, before he touches me.

“May I hold you?” he asks.

I throw myself into his arms, and he wraps them around me and tightens his hold, careful of the pressure but leaving no space between us. His heartbeat pounds hard against my ear.

“You made me cry again,” I say into his shirt.

“That one is my fault,” he says, and kisses the top of my hair. “The good kind, I hope. I have made you cry enough of the other kind to last both our lives.”

Then he lowers himself down onto one knee in front of me, careful of his wound, and pulls a ring from his pocket. It is shaped like a flower, thin branches of gold curving up to cradle a single diamond at the center, so perfect it is almost eerie.

“I used to think a promise was a chain,” he says. “Something you lock around a person so they cannot leave. I know now that it is choosing the same person, on purpose, every single day, even the hard ones.”

His voice is perfectly steady, and his hand trembles around the little box, as he continues. “I promise to be honest with you,” he says. “To respect your choices, even the ones I hate. To stand beside you instead of in front of you.”

My tears will not stop falling.

“I promise to love Milo like he is mine,” he says. “To protect our child with everything I have. And to spend the rest of my life proving to you that love is not a cage. Marry me.”

I look down at him kneeling on the stone in the warm light, this man half the city fears, a man on his knees at the feet of something he worships, waiting on my one word with his whole face open. “I might need some time to make my mind up,” I say.

He goes utterly still, the way he does when a deal turns against him at the table. “Then I will wait,” he says. “A lifetime, if that is what it takes. I have waited twenty years for the wrong woman. I can wait as long as you need for the right one.”

Something in my chest melts completely, all of it at once.

I let him sweat first, and then I hold out my left hand. “Yes,” I say.